Get the Lead Out! Cartridge-Free (& Erasable) Pencil Printer

How about a portable desktop printer that prints out pages you can erase? Beyond being a great, green and cheap alternative to buying endless colored ink cartridges, the prints themselves have a hand-made feel that only comes from that traditional graphite we all associate with hand-written letters and memos.

Like the idea so far? Time to mix it up a bit: there is also a section of eraser dust, making this quite possibly the only printer idea designed to not only produce text or images on paper, but to even allow you to ‘delete’ what you have done as needed!

Version two this ingenious idea by designer Hoyoung Lee is a bit more streamlined and portable, but boils down to the same simple black/gray-on-white process. This tube-shaped design alternate plays on the aesthetic of a rolled piece of paper – and fits inside a portfolio tube just like a set of drawings or blueprints would.

OK, these pencil-stub printers might be wonderfully eco-friendly in theory, but might be a bit far off in practice. Meanwhile, a much simpler alternative is presented in a piece of plastic tubing: a pencil-stub ‘joiner’ that lets you stack individual pencil bits back into a full-sized writing implement. Anyone who has ever been a fan of the most classic of writing devices – the common wood-and-lead pencil – knows how it becomes more and more painful to write and stubs grow ever smaller. Instead of worrying away at (or about) the point or trashing it prematurely, simply toss the leftover nub into the printer or splice it with another and move on.